Prof. Johan Bollen’s talk at University of Turin

He presented his team’s work “Models of collective mood: applications to financial market prediction” about the daily fluctuations of the public’s mood state in Twitter [see the paper]. They found that these fluctuations contain predictive information with regards to up and down movements of broad market indices, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average. They have also demonstrated the assortative nature of online sentiment by comparing the mood states of individual users over time to their social network neighbors.